“Or Do I Annihilate”
On 22 September, at the UN General Assembly, Donald Trump told the room he had, in his words, “a big decision to make: Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before… or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly?” He said the only thing that mattered was that Iran never have a nuclear weapon, said he wasn’t running in the midterms and would give the timing of an election no credence in his Iran decisions, then in the next breath predicted a deal would land after the midterms anyway, accusing Iran of stalling talks specifically to watch how he polls. Seventy-one percent of voters disapprove of his handling of foreign policy, the worst rating of either of his presidencies. Seventy-six percent say the war hasn’t been worth its cost in American lives and money. A president who insists an election means nothing to his decision-making, while describing a decision about annihilating a country in the same breath as that election, is not being contradictory by accident.
This is not an abstract threat aimed at an abstract enemy. On 28 February this year, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in a joint US-Israeli strike that opened the war outright. Seven months later, the sitting US president is telling the UN General Assembly he is personally deciding whether to annihilate what remains of the state whose head he already had killed. Annihilate is not rhetoric when the last person to occupy that country’s highest office is already dead by the hand of the country making the threat.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, answered the next day, 23 September, from the same podium. “Those who are terrorists… describe us using that word,” he said. “We have been the victims of terrorism… For the past two centuries, Iran had not attacked another country or territory.” He described 80,000 Gaza civilians as “brutally murdered” and held up photographs of children he said were killed in US-Israeli strikes on a school and a sports facility, then put the nuclear double standard on the record: Israel holds an undeclared, uninspected arsenal, while Iran is sanctioned into economic collapse over a programme international inspectors have never found weaponised. None of it changed the terms Washington is offering, which remain: disarm, or face a president who has already told the UN he’s deciding whether to erase your country.
The ordinary consequences of that standoff are landing already. A tanker was struck in the Strait of Hormuz on 23 September, leaving two casualties. A Qatar-mediated round of US-Iran talks broke down the same week over the strikes continuing and the sanctions staying on; Iranian officials say they are in no hurry, that their conditions are simply “waiting for the Americans to implement them,” relayed through Pakistan and Qatar because there is no direct channel left. Austria Airlines suspended its Tehran route until 24 October. FlyDubai halted Iran flights outright. Iraq, Oman and Azerbaijan routes were cancelled by Iran’s own civil aviation authority, and an Iranian official has threatened to close airports in any country that keeps cooperating with US flight restrictions. None of the people booked on those cancelled flights get a vote on the annihilation question either.
A head of state is dead, a currency has lost most of its value, ordinary flights keep getting cancelled over a strait two countries are still fighting over, and the president holding the country’s fate is framing the decision as something to be timed around an election he insists doesn’t matter to him. Iran’s costs are being paid by people who had no seat at the UN podium this week. The mutual aid requests below carry some of that same weight: people absorbing decisions made in rooms they were never invited into. Give what you can move today. Share what you can’t fund. A decision made in a General Assembly hall isn’t reversible by mutual aid, but the rent someone’s about to lose is, and that’s still worth doing.
A note before the list: mutualaidspace.org’s submission form is live. Submitting a request there gets it federated as @comrade, automatically tagged for wider reach, and listed publicly under Comrades & Community or Victims of Empire, whether or not the person asking has a Fediverse account of their own. No verification process, no proof of suffering required. More on the project itself: mutualaidspace.org/about
✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨
@squirrellilly, @ellespeaks, @QuyetPawz, @psychoalpastor, @nullagent, @Toadlyturtle, @thoughtpunks, @thereaders, @Kuniti_shino, @caten
✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨
Hadeel & her family need your help to survive in Gaza
Hadeel’s son Hamza needed stitches after cutting his finger on broken glass in Gaza and still needs further treatment, while her husband, an amputee, cannot work; the family has received no donations at all in ten straight days now. [View original post]
Help My Visually Impaired Children from Gaza Darkness
Abeer is raising Tala, Majd, and Moein, her three young children with severe visual disabilities, in a tent in Gaza after losing their home and work entirely; food, water, and every basic need remain painfully out of their daily reach. [View original post]
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This space is held together by a disabled Indonesian Muslim woman. Monthly support keeps me fed, medicated, and connected, and helps me keep resisting corporate funding and the humanitarian-industrial complex through my writing and mutual aid projects.
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